Sunday, April 13, 2008

Four Quartets

In considering last week’s discussion of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, I am still quite struck by the notion of Empire and the relationship between the masculine and feminine in the novel. Again, the incongruous dichotomy of the Victorian era – a female figurehead over the masculine stratification of power – serves to reinforce the societal gender roles. Indeed, previous discussions of gender play into this. If sex is genetic while gender is social, then the gender roles presented are learned. Men in this society are trapped into become “men of the house” – patriarchs – while the women become their obedient angels in the house choir. The evolution of this society funneled it toward this form.

I think that is quite key that the dividing line between the two most concrete phases of the novel, the first section and the third, are set before and after World War I. The Great War upset the whole of British society. The microcosm itself transitions from the Victorian to the “Modern” (or as close to it as Mr. Ramsay is willing to go) as a result of the upheavals of the war.

Now, in considering T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, I must first address my own reactions to them. I am not sure if I would place these poems above The Waste Land in his opus. Indeed, I would put the two along side each other as companion pieces. The Waste Land may not be quite as refined the later poems, but it has the virtue of a directed, brash gusto. It’s the work of a man presumptuous enough to write The Waste Land. Four Quartets is the work of that man many years later. It does not ooze brash presumption. It feels older, more well-worn.

When I read the Four Quartets, I hearken back to another poem: Tennyson’s Ulysses. Eliot’s voice in all four of these poems creaks with a withered and wizened age. The odysseys of experience that the speaker goes through in each poem feel the musings of Ulysses as he considers his time as king. Eliot makes many references to time, past, present, and future. Perhaps he is commenting on himself. Eliot knows that he is no longer the man who wrote The Waste Land.

Brooks says that the four poems are meditations on the religious. This much is understandable considering Eliot’s conversion to devout Christianity. Despite this, the sense of age dominates. If anything, I feel that the religious aspects are tempered by the “experience” of Eliot. If The Waste Land was his odyssey through the desolation of modern life, then the Four Quartets feels like his reconciliation with his maker – ars moriendis – the art of dying. If the world was neutered by World War I, then Four Quartets may present a funeral dirge to the modern era in the midst of World War II. The sense of eternity is profound. Indeed, the most common reference Eliot makes is to the fluid relationship between past, present, and future. The reader teeters on the edge of the afterlife.

Digression: I am somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of these poems being religiously (or, perhaps properly, spiritually) inspired. I myself did not perceive that aspect until after I had read the Brooks essay. Still, it does not sit right with me. Perhaps this is a result of my late Twentieth Century upbringing where a cornucopia of religious references in a creative work would not necessarily imply a religious inspiration. For me, the sense of Eliot the elder poet dominates far more than Eliot the religious man.